On Apr 18, 2011, at 6:33 PM, David Conrad wrote:
As far as I can tell, the participants in ARIN's processes are more interested in trying to be a regulator than in being a registry. Given ARIN is not a government body and it does not have full buy-in from those who they would try to regulate, I suspect this will directly result in a proliferation of folks like tradeipv4.com, depository.net, etc. Unfortunately, I figure this will have negative repercussions for network operations (unless someone steps in and provides a definitive "address titles registry").
I agree completely with this concern. Against good advice of friends (who said I would be wasting my time), I tried to do something about it: I introduced several policy proposals to ARIN that deal with the question of authority and ownership. At John Curran's advice, the ARIN Advisory Council abandoned my proposals. Two of them are now in "petition" for further discussion, including ARIN-prop-134 which outlines how to identify a "legitimate address holder" and ARIN-prop-136 which allows a Legacy holder to "opt-out" of ARIN's services. The idea is to make it possible for legacy holders (who don't have a contract with ARIN) to disarm ARIN's whois weapon. If anybody on NANOG supports these concepts, please express your support to PPML so that the proposals can move forward. Please see these links for more info:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/2011-April/020604.html
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/2011-April/020605.html
Cheers, -Benson